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Got a small business? Are you looking to step into the world of digital marketing and SEO in particular? If yes is your answer, then you’ll be glad to know that you’re on the right path. However, you should be aware that small business SEO is not as straightforward as it sounds — it could even turn out to be the most difficult form of promoting your business online. But the good news is, the right SEO can give your small business a better chance of getting strong organic search visibility, and that’s huge. As you may know, organic listings help build trust with website visitors, and that’s one of the most important things you need for the long-term success of your business. What is SEO? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of increasing the quantity of quality traffic to your site via organic search engine results. In a nutshell, SEO increases your website’s chance of ranking high in Search Engine Ranking Positions (SERPs) of search engines like Google or Bing. How Does SEO Work? The entire process of SEO begins with your website, and Google is the big player in the picture. For the most part, Google sends out crawlers, or “spiders”, to discover and scan every accessible page on just about every website on the web. What do they do? The robots follow links and gather information on each webpage and eventually send it to Google servers across the world. When this happens, web surfers can freely search for terms related to your site and get answers to their questions. Essentially, when a user enters a relevant search term, the Google algorithm starts processing all the information that has been previously gathered from your website and similar sites. At this point, Google sifts through the sites and picks the ones that are most relevant to the search query, placing the best options at the top and least relevant at the bottom. Still a bit confused? Well, just picture the internet as your local library: Your website is the newest book on the shelf and the Google robot is the librarian. The librarian looks through your book and figures out the most reasonable section to place it in — this will make it easier for visitors to find your book and that’s important. Remember, visitors will have to explore through several different titles to find what they’re looking for, and if things go well and the librarian has placed your book in the right section, your book might turn to be exactly what the visitor was looking for! What More Do You Need to Know About SEO? Well, among other things, you should be aware that SEO is constantly evolving and site owners have been trying to figure out how to make their websites rank in top search engines — it has been this way since the 1990s. As time went on, a deceptive type of optimization was developed by some SEO practitioners — it was meant to trick the Google algorithm into thinking their site was more relevant than it actually was. This is called “Blackhat SEO” and it has since been frowned upon by search engine algorithms primarily because of the terrible user experience it created for web users. Look: Blackhat SEO techniques are becoming less effective by the day and SEO is in a constant state of evolution. That said, you should know that what worked a few years ago may be totally useless or blacklisted right now. For the most part, Google would waste no time to penalize your site if it finds that you’ve been using Blackhat SEO techniques — it could be shot down to the last page of SERPs! So how can you avoid this? Well, it’s pretty simple — always provide visitors with relevant and original information, and stick to improving their experience. When you do this, you can be 100% sure that your website is search engine friendly. Alright, let’s move on! MAIN SEO AREAS TO CONSIDER AS A SMALL BUSINESS Website First things first: You need a professionally designed website to get started. It’s also crucial for it to be fast and mobile-friendly. To find the right ecommerce platform for you, check out this roundup of the best ecommerce platform. Content Always stick to high-quality content and be sure to emphasize why a customer should choose you over the competition. Try to craft informational blog content at all times — doing this can boost awareness and place you at the forefront of a bigger audience. On-Page SEO It’s also an excellent idea to work with basic optimization, so you should be looking at page titles and meta descriptions.. Local SEO Your small business will also want to promote its product and services to local customers at the time they need it the most. Sticking to Local SEO best practices is crucial. Credibility Want your clients to see your business as the real deal? If yes, look into case studies, reviews, portfolios, testimonials, and reviews — all these can help you seal the deal in no time. Authority Building When your business becomes an authority, you’ll find that many other websites will be linking to you. The good thing is, these high-quality links can help your business’ website rank highly in Google’s SERPs, and that’s huge.   More information on SEO and related topics will be published soon. Stay tuned.   ..

Most tech startup successes have humble beginnings. We have all heard stories of the brilliant founder who starts his company at his home garage or basement, makes something great, finds a partner and goes on to conquer the world. In the very early stages of your startup, working from home or a garage can be fine. However, at a certain point, you will need to change. You cannot always keep meeting clients at restaurants or coffee shops. Moreover, working from home can see your productivity wane with distractions like kids, family, dog and TV. You can avoid the problems of working from home by moving to a coworking space. Coworking spaces have become very popular and are springing all over the country. While the spaces are not new, what they provide tech startups for the price keeps improving. Co-Working Space Environment Co-working spaces are not just vast areas with desks and chairs offering tech entrepreneurs high-speed internet connection. The areas are made to be exciting places to work that can improve your productivity. In a typical coworking space environment, you will find jeans-clad entrepreneurs working quietly with their laptops. Coffee and pastries are usually well stocked and you can order lunch through a concierge. If you need a change of scenery and want to improve your productivity, consider moving from a private office or home basement to a coworking space. As a startup, you need to access to various resources fast and affordably. Apart from this, you need encouragement from other peers when the going gets tough. This is why you need coworking space. Below are four benefits of working in a coworking space: 1. Build Relationships You can build relationships that can help you and your startup at a coworking space. As you are building your company, you probably don’t have enough cash to hire more people to your team. Thus, you will be relying on freelancers to do most of the work you cannot do on your own. At coworking spaces, you will typically find freelancers that can help you with your web design, graphic design, accounting matters, online marketing and so on. In fact, you have a full team that is within easy reach to build your company. Moreover, since the professionals are in the same office you are in, it is easy to discuss your needs with them and see their implementation. Some of these freelancers can become lifelong friends and who knows, you can even find a co-founder in them. 2. Make Clients Happy Before the orders start coming in, clients will want to meet you face to face to discuss business. Meeting with clients in a conference rooms is more professional than at a coffee shop. Moreover, you can always go to clients wherever they are if there is a co-working space in the area. With coworking space, you do not have to miss a customer because you don’t have a place to meet or show them what you have. Coworking spaces provide entrepreneurs with full office services including conference rooms. 3. Find Clients and Business Ideas You can find your next client and business idea from a coworking space. If you are building a small business solution, some of the coworking workers can be your first clients. You can use their feedback to improve your product before finally putting it out to the world. On the same note, you can find your next business idea through the problems that fellow coworkers face. If there is one person with a problem, you can bet there are many others just like him around the country with the same problem. 4. Affordable for the Service Coworking spaces are affordable for startups and provide the right environment to flourish. The spaces are dedicated to improving productivity and provide a host of business solutions at a very small fee. Moreover, most spaces have flexible membership options. You can have space for a day or even a few months depending on what you want. Co-working spaces are great alternatives for tech entrepreneurs building their business. ..